Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

Frederick Edward McWilliam ARA RBA (1909-1992) Artist (1963) Bronze with a mid-brown patina, 46 x 48cm, (18 x 19") Signed McW and dated 63 Exhibited: Irish Art 1943-1973, Cork Rosc 1980, Cat. No. 151 The Crawford Gallery, Cork, Aug-Nov 1980 The Ulster Museum, Belfast, Jan-Feb 1981 Literature: Full page illustration Cork Rosc 1980, Cat. Fig. 22, p75 Born in Banbridge, Co. Down, McWilliam studied at Belfast College of Art for two years and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where he studied under Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe. His intentions of becoming a painter had been altered when he met Henry Moore at Slade and decided to focus instead on sculpture. McWilliam held a studio at Port d'Orléans in Paris for a year before returning to England. On a return trip to the French capital with his wife, Beth, he visited the studio of long established modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. In 1936 McWilliam attended the International Surrealist Exhibition at the new Burlington Galleries in London, and in 1938 he exhibited with the British Surrealist Group. His first solo exhibition was at the London Gallery in the following year, where he noted that his Surrealist sculptures were 'rather bare-toothed in conception but very beautiful in execution.' McWilliam's work spans sculptural mediums such as wood, bronze, lignum vitae and aluminium. His sculptures and drawings have been exhibited widely in Ireland and the UK, including the Ulster Museum (Belfast), Hannover Gallery (London), the Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin) and the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery (Cork). His first American exhibition was held at the Felix Landau Gallery (Los Angeles) in 1963. His works have been purchased by institutions such as the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden). McWilliam was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by Queens University in 1964, and in the same year he was described by Roland Penrose as 'an inventor of styles.' In 1971 he won the Oireachtas gold medal for sculpture and was appointed a Fellow of University College London. In 1989 McWilliam was appointed a Senior Royal Academician, and the Irish Times said that his work was 'unmistakably his own, craftsman-like, humorous, imaginative, with a playful, poetic, slightly capricious element that sets it apart.' The subject matter of Artist is typical of McWilliam, who has sculpted the human form throughout his career. The painter made in bronze here is abstracted to a high degree. The structural elements of the piece are balanced perfectly both materially and aesthetically and the highly worked gestural surface of the work makes it seem at once spontaneous and solidly permanent.